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Intel 6xx Series Reviewed and Benchmarked
sebFlyte writes "It's been a long time coming, but Intel's first 64-bit desktop chip (the 6xx series) is here now, and thanks to ZDNet it has been thoroughly tested. The article has the full specs of the new family, explains the benefits of the changes, and also the results of tests on the new chips to establish perfomance boosts for games, photo manipulation and video work, among other things."
Looks like Intel's really moving away from marketing its GHz. Its Pentium M has been using 7xx, and this 64bit is on 6xx.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Intel has fallen behind as the mainstream CPU manufacterer. I wonder how long consumer will pay a premium for slower Intel CPUs
y _title= Analysts--AMD-Beating-Intel-in-Chip-Design&story_i d=27767&category=hardware
Analysts' assessments came after Intel announced last week that it was scrapping plans to develop a 4-gigahertz version of its Pentium 4 chip. On Tuesday, AMD unveiled a pair of advanced new chips, the Athlon 64 FX-55 and the Athlon 64 4000-plus, which analysts believe will be more appealing at the high end of the PC market.
more here:
http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?stor
Ha, like Microsoft will leave that called AMD64. Expect some diplomacy and a renaming. Not that anyone but techies care.
Why would they care? When Intel invented the i*86 line, everybody software manufacturer called any Intel-compatible CPU "i*86" somewhere or other, and neither AMD, Cyrix,... complained about it. Now the situation is reversed: AMD took the lead on that particular 64 bit design, and Intel is just a follower here. It sounds rather normal and deserved that any AMD64-compatible chip should generically called "AMD64" after all.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
This article also compares Intel's announced CPU's with AMD's CPU's that you can actually buy. This is just a fluff piece-- same as the "Extreme Edition" that would overheat and that no one could buy for around 6 months.
If you look at yesterdays news, you will see that AMD is releasing dual core chips soon. So when both of these new chips actually are available in quantity-- then lets do a review. Hyperthreading will not look so good then.
Hyper Threading is an engineering solution to try and fix the problem created by Intel's marketing department-- when the company let them design the Pentium 4 to scale on Megahertz and not on performance. After that fiasco, Intel got its butt handed to it on just about all benchmarks by the Athlon. Intel management then panicked, and Intel's engineers salvaged the long processor pipeline with "Hyper Threading".
Dual cores (SMP) are the better solution. When dual cores come out, hyper threading looses most of its advantage.
TM2 is overheat protection, controlled by the processor's PROCHOT signal (processor hot). This signal is activated if the CPU's thermal diode detects critical temperature levels. TM2 will dynamically reduce core voltage and clock speed in order to cool down the CPU.
SpeedStep does exactly the same as TM2, with the difference that it is initiated by the operating system. Whenever the system load is low, Windows XP SP2 will cause the CPU to lower the clock speed in 200 MHz increments by using ACPI mechanisms. Again, this is performed dynamically, which means that executing a demanding application will cause the system to speed up again.
These sorts of protective mechanisms mean that your "3.6 Ghz" Intel processor might not be operating at either 3.6 Ghz or the core voltage that you have selected when either the motherboard or the Windows XP operating system determine that the thermal situation is getting out of hand. The original idea behind the early implementations of this stuff was to protect your cpu from catastrophic damage when the cooling fan failed, or some similar catastrophic event. Now, however, the stealthy way that Intel is implementing these mechanisms in both the hardware and the OS suggests that they have moved into the realm of selling performance that the system may not thermally be capable of delivering on a sustained basis. Will the user see any indication that their system is slowing down or that the voltage has been decreased? In effect, the Intel systems are becoming more like 'dragsters' that are capable of short periods of high acceleration and speed but perhaps unable to operate at speed on a sustained basis.
IMHO, the area in which AMD has really distinguished itself is in the power consumption of its desktop processors. Generally speaking, non-Intel x86 CPUs (from AMD and Cyrix) historically had a reputation for running extremely hot. The situation has been reversed in recent years, with Intel pushing the upper limits of power consumption with its Pentium 4 (especially with Prescott) while AMD was doing the exact opposite with its Athlon 64. This has resulted in a huge difference in power consumption between the two competitors. Consider the following CPUs which are basically direct competitors (roughly the same price):
Power consumption at idle
Athlon 64 3500+ (Winchester): 13.4W
Pentium IV 640 (Prescott 2M): 35.4W
Power consumption at full utilisation
Athlon 64 3500+ (Winchester): 47.5W
Pentium IV 640 (Prescott 2M): 129.4W
Source: 90nm Processors from AMD and Intel Pentium 4 6XX.
The often trivial differences in performance look rather insignificant in comparison. Also consider that these results come after Intel's best attempts at reducing the P4's power consumption (enhanced idle states in P4 5XX and SpeedStep in the 6XX) and you can see how inefficient the architecture is in this regard.
This of course applies to desktop CPUs. Intel redeems itself somewhat with its Pentium M in the notebook market.